Building the Opposition Register
Seeing opposition clearly is worth little until you capture it in a form you can reason over. The opposition register does that: make the event, not the project, your unit of record, so trajectory survives; impose controlled vocabularies for event type, outcome state, and reason, because a register that cannot count cannot find patterns; and record the source of every event, because traceability is the whole of its credibility. Layer transparent, rule-based scoring on top, and let old assessments visibly age. Then point it forward through a consistent set of early-warning indicators, velocity in a virgin market, a crystallizing impact figure, a named group and locked frame, the arrival of outside professionals, accumulating procedural friction, and regional contagion, and wire those indicators into shortlisting, diligence, and portfolio decisions. Built honestly, the register turns the thing that surprises you late into the thing you saw coming early.
Knowledge check
Why should the unit of record in an opposition register be the event rather than the project?
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Because a project reduced to a single status flattens its history into a stale snapshot, whereas recording each event, application, continuance, moratorium, demanded study, appeal, denial, preserves the trajectory. Trajectory is where early warning lives, since repetition of events like continuances signals trouble before participants concede it, and events can still roll up to project, jurisdiction, and market levels.